An Israeli rabbi who had previously announced that genocide must be proceeded in Gaza, advised the Israeli soldiers to rape during war to satisfy their needs.

A chief rabbi of Safad in Israel approved rape by the soldiers in a 2002 article that has gone largely unnoticed.

Shmuel Eliyahu contended that Israeli soldiers would lose their motivation to wage war if they are not allowed to rape non-Jewish women, according to Kipa.co.il, a popular Hebrew-language website catering for religious Jews

The comments were made five years before Eliyahu recommended that Israel should use massive force in Gaza. In 2007, he said that Israel “must kill 100,000, even a million” people in Gaza if that was necessary to stop Palestinian resistance fighters from firing rockets.

The rabbi’s comments on rape were highlighted in a recent Facebook post by Ruhama Weiss, a Jerusalem-based academic. In a column called “Ask the Rabbi,” Eliyahu suggested that a biblical law authorized sexual violence under certain circumstances. He was responding to a question – apparently by one of the website’s readers – about whether women could be viewed as “war booty.”

Now he has got to fight, and you shouldn’t be preaching morality to him. Do it at home, before the war, and not now in the middle of the war. Don’t weaken his spirit. If you forbid him from a beautiful woman and he’s enraptured by her outer charms, then he’ll think about her and is likely to get to the point where the Jewish people will be defeated. What will you gain from that?

In 2010, Eliyahu authored a religious edict forbidding Jews from selling or even renting property to non-Jewish people. Eliyahu leaned on a local resident in Safad, a then-89-year-old survivor of the Nazism, to stop renting rooms in his home to Palestinian citizens of Israel, students at the local college. The man eventually asked the students to leave, after he was warned over the phone that his home would be torched if he didn’t.

Sexual assaults and sex crimes have been recurrently reported in Israeli army and among Israeli lawmakers. Rabbis have also been alleged with rape for numerous times.